Actress Eva Longoria participates in an Early Vote Canvass Kickoff in West Palm Beach, Florida.

That was President Barack Obama’s job approval rating among Hispanics in January, according to Gallup.

The figure is close to the 71 percent support Obama received from Hispanic voters in the 2012 election, according to a national exit poll.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney received 27 percent of the Hispanic vote, one reason he lost to Obama by 5 million votes nationwide and in key states such as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where Hispanics are more than 20 percent of the population.

“If you’re going to lose Hispanic votes by 44 points — and that is the largest-growing demographic in America — you’re going to consign yourself on a national level of being a minority party in perpetuity,” Peter Wehner, who advised Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said yesterday on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” program.

Some Republicans say they can begin to improve their party’s poor image among Hispanics by pushing for an overhaul of immigration laws that offers a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Obama wants to enact an immigration plan this year and has sought support from business executives.

A rewrite of immigration laws “is something that we should be able to get done certainly this year, and I’d like to see if we can get it done sooner, in the first half of the year is possible,” Obama said Jan. 30 in an interview with the Spanish-language television station Telemundo.